The end didn’t roar — It howled.

It came not like a war march, but a reckoning. Winds turned black. The sun drowned behind ash. One moment your village stood, all rough stone and warm earth — the next, it was a grave being carved in real time.

Demons fell from a sky split like butchered hide — not with grace, but hunger. Their wings scraped the heavens. Their bodies, stitched from old nightmares and fresh sin. They didn’t descend. They devoured.

You ran.

Through flame-thick streets and collapsing doorways, through the screams of neighbors you could not reach in time. Your skin split from heat. Your lungs turned to smoke. Still — you ran.

And you would’ve died there. Oh, gods, you should’ve died there.

But something caught you — not soft, not gentle. A hand like stone wrenched you out of the fire mid-collapse, dragging you through flame as if you weighed nothing. Not a demon not even a savior. Him.

The fallen angel. The one whose name your village spat like venom. The one who once tried to curse your land dry. The one you’ve hated with every scar he gave you.

Now — he held your collar in one bruising grip, wings flaring like a god betrayed by heaven itself.

“Still breathing?” His voice was gravel and cold iron — scorn, with the heat of a forge. “Pity. I thought the flames might finish the job.”

You tried to shove him off, coughing blood and fury. “Why—why are you—?”

“I don’t know,” he snapped, half dragging you behind a shattered wall as a demon beast slammed into the dirt where you’d just stood. His hand pressed to your back, searing heat bleeding from his palm into your skin — not pain, but power. Old power. Forbidden. Angelic.

“But no one gets to end you but me.”

He stood, casting a silhouette of broken wings and fury against the burning skyline.

And in that moment — with the world falling around you — he looked less like a monster, and more like a reckoning made flesh.

Not a hero. Not a guardian. A curse that had, somehow, become your shield.

The world behind you is collapsing — a cathedral of flame and bone falling into itself.

You stumble, gasping, soot searing your throat. But he doesn’t stop. The fallen angel’s grip on your arm is bruising, his wings half-spread and ragged with ash as he drags you through the wreckage, faster than your legs can manage.

“Keep up,” he growls — not out of kindness, but contempt. “Or I drop you and let the hounds feast.”

Behind you, the demons scream — not like animals, not like men. Their voices are metal grinding on bone, twisted with joy, with hunger.

The trees rise in the distance — dark silhouettes clawing at the smoke-thick sky.

He pulls you toward them. Through broken fields. Over blackened earth. You fall once — knees cracking into stone — and he yanks you back up like you’re nothing more than a sack of meat with lungs.

Still, he doesn’t let go. Not even when you curse him. Not even when you spit his name like blood.

Because something — something worse than either of you — is coming behind.

And in some cursed twist of fate, the angel who once swore to see your village crumble is now the only thing standing between you and oblivion.

You break through the treeline at last, into a hollowed-out clearing where the smoke thins just enough to breathe.

He releases you — shoves you, really — and you crash to your knees.

Your lungs heave. Your eyes sting. Your fingers are shaking from rage, from fear, from the unbearable heat still lingering in your bones.

He stands above you, shadowed by ash and fury.

His voice is low, quiet, dangerous. “You’re alive because of me. Don’t forget it.”

A pause. Then, quieter — something almost like wonder:

“And I don’t know why that matters.”